bird flu
revere | March 4, 2008Press releases are the way a lot of scientific information is released today. Straight to the public, no peer review. This has advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are speed and directness. No filtering through reviewers, journal editors, colleagues. And of course that's the disadvantage, too, especially when the news comes from an interested party as it usually does in a press release. This is part of the interpretation of data these days. All that being said, the maker of Tamiflu, Hoffman - La Roche, has released data they have gathered from physicians treating cases of H5N1 in…
revere | March 3, 2008Highly pathogenic variant of avian influenza A of the subtype H5N1 is here to stay, at least in the world's poultry population. While it's around it continues to cause sporadic but deadly human infections, some 369 of them of whom 234 have died (official WHO figures as of 28 February 2008). So this virus can infect humans and make them seriously or fatally ill. There is truly massive exposure because people live in close contact with infected domestic poultry in many countries. And the human population has not seen this subtype of virus before so there is little natural immunity. All that's…
revere | March 2, 2008The Indonesian virus sharing impasse is said to be over, and with the dénouement comes some fascinating new information. Many will remember the row started when an Australian vaccine maker took an Indonesian viral isolate and made an experimental vaccine from it (see many posts among those here). At the time it was said the Indonesian Health Minister objected that her country would never be able to afford the vaccine and she therefore stopped making the virus available to WHO. WHO was the source of the seed strain used by the Australian company to make a prototype vaccine.
It turns out,…
revere | February 28, 2008When WHO tells us that there is no bigger bird flu problem in China I guess it's all relative. Like the old joke where one old man asks the other how he feels, the answer is "compared to what"?
The World Health Organization says that while there have already been three deaths from bird flu in China this year, there are no signs the deadly disease is becoming a bigger problem.
In a statement Wednesday, the WHO's top representative in China, Hans Troedsson, says the three recent cases were not unexpected considering the winter season. (VOA News)
Despite the occurrence of three deaths in China…
revere | February 23, 2008Indonesia is providing bird flu specimens to WHO again. And Indonesian Health Minister Dr Siti Fadilah Supari has just published a book declaring the 50 year plus history of global influenza surveillance is part of a conspiracy by the developed world to control the rest of the world:
"Developed countries become richer because they have the capability to develop the vaccine and control the world," she writes.
Dr Supari also expresses alarm at WHO laboratories sharing bird flu virus data with the United States National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where nuclear weapons are developed.
"…
revere | February 21, 2008A notice from ProMed yesterday alerted many of us to a new published report [subscription firewall] about H5N1 influenza detection in an arthropod species in the vicinity of an infected poultry farm. The arthropods were mosquitoes (Culex tritaeniorhynchus) in Thailand. Two years ago a similar report implicated blowflies (Calliphora nigribarbis and Aldrichina grahami) near some infected farms in Kyoto, Japan. Both papers suggested using arthropods near infected farms as surveillance tools. But both, especially the Japanese paper, raised the open question whether arthropods might play a part in…
revere | February 20, 2008A paper published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) extends the work of a group of glycobiologists at MIT on unravelling why some flu virus likes bird cells and others like human cells. Glycobiology is the science that investigates the sugar studded proteins on the outside of cells. Like a suit of clothes, a cell's glycoprotein cover plays important functions in protecting the cell, identifying it and as a signal to interact with things outside of itself, such as hormones or immune cells. But other organisms have learned to use the same signals and can…
revere | February 19, 2008There's bird flu in poultry all over Bangladesh and new human cases reported in China, Vietnam and Indonesia. Is this the sound of the other shoe dropping? Or is it just this:
This barchart is from February 5 so it doesn't include all the new cases. But it clearly shows that when we get to flu season we also get to bird flu season. How will we know if something different is happening? It's a good question and I don't have an easy answer. Here are four signals and what I would make of them.
Sudden increase in number of cases that are not connected or are connected by a common source (as…
revere | February 13, 2008If avian influenza comes to North America one likely route is through importation or smuggling of infected birds. To protect ourselves, we need good border controls and to do that the US Department of Agriculture needs to know where in the world outbreaks are occurring. A USDA Inspector General's Report says that isn't happening:
The USDA should have tested new or revised procedures that relate to pandemic planning, but the agency has not tested 14 of 26 tasks for which it was designated the lead agency, the report states. Though the federal plan does not require the USDA to test the…
revere | February 12, 2008A recently published Commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) raises some interesting and serious questions about conventional efforts for pandemic flu preparedness. The author is John Middaugh of the Florida State Health Department, a long time public health professional. The last I saw him he was in Alaska, so he seems to have put quite a bit of distance between his current and former places of employment. Indeed the question of people distancing themselves from each other is a central theme of the Commentary:
Although continuing to invest in diverse aspects of…
revere | February 11, 2008I clipped something from AP Pakistan last week but didn't use it because of interruptions. It turns out that Crof at H5N1 noted it at the time but I have a few observations to add, even at this late date. First, here's the gist:
Federal Minister for Food, Agriculture and Livestock, Prince Esa Jan Baloch here on Wednesday asked the journalists to focus on factual, objective and positive reporting to check spread of misconceptions and misinformation regarding the outbreak of bird flu in the country.
Addressing a press conference, following the coordination meeting between Ministry of Food…
revere | February 7, 2008Because he's too fat. Broiler chickens (the ones raised for meat) are essentially a cash crop, grown much like wheat or corn. When the chicken is ripe it's harvested. The Grim Reaper. We admit to not knowing much about poultry science and the business it supports, but because of our interest in bird flu we have been learning. There is a some well founded suspicion intensive poultry farming is one of the enabling conditions for the evolution and spread of bird flu.
These birds are raised under very difficult conditions and lead their short lives in extraordinary population densities, often…
revere | February 6, 2008Bird flu is all over the Indian state of West Bengal and the country that borders it on the east, Bangladesh. The Ganges River flows through West Bengal, dividing in two, with one branch headed into Bangladesh. The Gangetic alluvium and delta region also has another unhappy claim to fame: it is the site of an enormous chronic poisoning from groundwater containing naturally occurring arsenic.
The mass poisoning that is occurring in West Bengal and Bangladesh is another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Drinking water is one of the most important resources for any community and the…
revere | February 5, 2008Bangladesh is a country with more than its share of woes. Now there is H5N1 galloping through its poultry. Bangladesh needs all the help it can get. Which also means it needs to help others, too. How can a resource poor country like Bangladesh help other nations? They can start by sharing the genetic sequences of the viruses isolated from their poultry:
Bangladesh has refused to share the genetic details of its H5N1 bird flu virus with India. In a blow to India's efforts to find the origin of the highly pathogenic avian influenza strain that is presently wreaking havoc in West Bengal,…
revere | February 4, 2008Blogging can be exhausting. A blogger who wants to be read (not all do) has a hungry mouth, a mouth best fed daily. This one gets fed twice (once on Saturday), seven days a week, 365 days a year. The Reveres have been shoveling stuff into this ravenous maw for over three years. So we sympathize and understand the plight of the excellent flu blogger Sophia Zoe who has been missing of late. She explains where she's been in A Lesson in Real Life (hat tip Avian Flu Diary). Characteristic of her excellent blogging, she also draws a pandemic preparedness lesson from it worth pondering. Here's the…
revere | February 1, 2008The AP's Margie Mason is a pretty good flu reporter and she has a story on the wires today whose title encapsulates the bird flu history of the last four years: Bird flu continues march 4 years later. The number of human deaths is still not large -- a few hundred -- just a day at the office in Iraq. But the virus just keeps extending its geographic range in poultry stocks and wherever it does it there is a risk of human infections. Fourteen countries so far have officially confirmed influenza A/H5N1 cases. The number of birds killed by infection or slaughtered to prevent the spread of…
revere | January 31, 2008The number of deaths in Indonesia from bird flu just shot past the 100 mark without even pausing -- 101 was recorded right afterward. Tibet announced an outbreak and the disease continued to march through the Indian subcontinent, although the UN flu czar, Dr. David Nabarro said he thought the Indian/West Bengal outbreak was "coming under control." The use of the progressive tense here ("coming under control") suggests this is a mix of hope and belief and in any case indicates the outbreak is still not under control. Which won't come as a surprise to the residents of Kolkata (neé Calcutta):…
revere | January 29, 2008Since the antiviral agent oseltamivir (Tamiflu) has been touted as the global savior should a bird flu pandemic materialize the idea has been haunted by the specter of Tamiflu resistance. What if H5N1 becomes resistant to the drug? Is all lost? Now it is being reported in the media that the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention has found that the predominant circulating seasonal flu virus in Europe this year, H1N1, is showing an unexpectedly high rate of Tamiflu resistance (19/148 isolates tested). This is much more than what has been seen in the past and was from patients not…
revere | January 28, 2008Everyone knows it's flu season. We see the evidence in birds and people with H5N1. The Indian subcontinent is awash in birds with H5N1. Sometimes here we forget to remind people it is also flu season with the regular circulating subtypes, H1 and H3 and this is shaping up to be a predominantly H1 season in Europe and the US.
In the US:
During week 3 (January 13 - 19, 2008), influenza activity continued to increase in the United States.
Three hundred twenty-nine (11.1%) specimens tested by U.S. World Health Organization (WHO) and National Respiratory and Enteric Virus Surveillance System (…
revere | January 27, 2008There's no vaccine for the influenza subtype, H5N1, of most concern as the agent of the next pandemic but evidence exists that there is some cross-reactivity with existing seasonal vaccines (it's not clear how much if any, but it might not take much) or that previous vaccination with seasonal vaccine produces a much quicker response to an H5N1 vaccine. Moreover there remains a substantial toll in morbidity and mortality from the seasonal influenza which the current vaccines are designed for. So strategies to encourage key populations to get the existing flu vaccine are of interest to public…